Russian Parliament

MOSCOW -- A day of intense and pervasive police pressure around the Russian parliament building led last night to clashes with demonstrators and the promise of more to come.Thousands of gray-uniformed police, many of them young draftees, totally sealed off the parliament, known as the White House, cutting off access and food supplies. They strung coils of razor wire across nearby streets and blocked intersections with dozens of water tankers.Just as the Americans did in Panama when they were after Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega, the Russian police yesterday broadcast loud pop music toward the parliament building.

Moscow -- It can take as many as eight years for a case to journey, from start to finish, through the halls of justice at the European Court of Human Rights, where some 90,000 complaints are pending. Yet a plan designed to streamline the court's operation has stalled on Russia's doorstep. The nation is the lone holdout, among the 46 countries in the Council of Europe, in ratifying 2 1/2 -year-old reform measures that supporters say are badly needed to address the mounting caseload at the chronically overburdened court.

MOSCOW (Reuters) -- Communist hard-liners in the Russian parliament tried to oust Boris N. Yeltsin as leader yesterday in a furious response to his demand for the resignation of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.They called for an extraordinary meeting of the full Russian parliament with the clear aim of proposing a vote of no confidence in Mr. Yeltsin, Mr. Gorbachev's political archrival."Yeltsin's striving for authoritarian rule and confrontation and his desire to decide issues of internal and foreign policy on his own are becoming more and more obvious," said a statement read to parliament by one member, Svetlana Goryacheva.

MOSCOW - Shoved to the margins of power, its legacy scorned or ignored, the Communist Party hopes to draw 100,000 marchers to its May Day demonstrations here today, for its biggest show in a decade. And Tatiana Skvortsova plans to be in the vanguard. She is 62, a well-educated Muscovite who joined the party four years ago, long after the collapse of the Soviet state. It was only after the old order was demolished, she said, that she learned where her duty lies: to struggle to restore the glories of the socialist era. "My father died protecting the Soviet system, for Soviet equality," said Skvortsova, whose father disappeared while delivering ammunition to Soviet troops in 1943 during the German siege of Leningrad.

Former Russian Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar makes no apologies for the radical economic reforms he enacted in 1992 and 1993, even though the backlash against them forced him out of Russian President Boris Yeltsin's cabinet in January, and he says his country needs more of the same."

Russian President Boris Yeltsin's demand last week for early elections for a new parliament is most welcome, because Russia's current parliament is a relic of the past. Having just spent three weeks in the Russian parliament on a congressional exchange program, I am convinced that the future of reform in Russia depends on the election of a new legislature.The members of the Russian parliament, the Congress of Peoples' Deputies, were elected when the Communist Party was still dominant. Indeed, well-known figures from Russia's communist past still line up every noon at the Congress' cafeteria to avail themselves of some of Moscow's best food -- at minimal cost.

MOSCOW -- The Leningrad military commander refused to send his troops into the city, the air force balked at orders from above, and an officer in the Pacific Fleet talked a skeleton crew into slipping its crippled submarine out to sea rather than serving the junta.The turning point for the Soviet military came "when the army had to make the choice of whom to defend," the reactionaries backed by the party or Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, said Vladimir Lopatin, deputy chairman of the Russian parliament's Defense Committee.

MOSCOW -- The two leading candidates for the Russian presidency, Boris N. Yeltsin and Nikolai I. Ryzhkov, squared off -- for an unprecedented election campaign yesterday by selecting heroes of the war in Afghanistan as their running mates.But in keeping with their political stances, Mr. Yeltsin chose an ex-prisoner of war who has split the Communist Party by founding a reformist faction, while Mr. Ryzhkov chose the conservative last commander of Soviet troops in the disastrous 10-year war.Mr.

MOSCOW -- Awakened before dawn Monday morning and ordered to get his men into tanks and head toward the Soviet capital, Lt. Nikolai Kotlerov had no idea he was being sent to enforce a reactionary coup d'etat."

MOSCOW -- Soviet tanks dispatched to threaten Boris N. Yeltsin dramatically turned around to defend him last night, threatening to split the army and weakening the control of the right-wingers who removed Mikhail S. Gorbachev in a coup d'etat earlier yesterday.Thousands of people who had gathered outside the giant white Russian parliament cheered and shouted "Yeltsin, Yeltsin," when tanks from the elite Tamanskaya division shifted position just after 10 p.m. Moscow time and pointed their guns outward.

RUSSIAN President Boris N. Yeltsin has again tossed a political hand grenade before darting back behind the Kremlin's walls, leaving observers to wonder at his increasingly inexplicable behavior. With Mr. Yeltsin's firing of Prime Minister Sergei V. Stepashin last week, and his appointment of the virtually unknown Vladimir V. Putin as his successor, a total of four people have served in that position during the past 18 months. In the Western media, commentators struggling to explain the string of firings have concentrated on Mr. Yeltsin's poor health, in many cases linking his frailty to his concern to secure his legacy: a more democratic Russia, set on the path of market reforms, increasingly linked with the West and free from the menace of a Communist resurgence.

MOSCOW -- The news that Russia had a new prime minister was buried a full seven minutes into yesterday's evening newscast. Vladimir V. Putin's confirmation by the lower house of parliament was so thoroughly expected, and so widely believed to herald little in the way of real change, that it couldn't begin to compete with fresh reports from the fighting in southern Dagestan between Russian troops and Islamic rebels. Putin looks sterner and speaks more sharply than his predecessor, Sergei V. Stepashin, but members of the decisive lower house of parliament have refused to be drawn into a fight over his nomination.

FIVE MONTHS behind a schedule that would have better served American security interests, the Senate has ratified START II, the most important nuclear arms reduction treaty in history. The pact negotiated by the Bush administration now faces an uncertain future in the Russian parliament, where communists and nationalists hostile to the United States scored important gains in December elections.Washington's delay was the handiwork of Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Jesse Helms, who held up the pact to force the Clinton administration to accommodate his demands for consolidation of foreign policy operations.

WHEN PRIME MINISTER Viktor Chernomyrdin hit the campaign trail and went to open a new children's hospital in St. Petersburg, he found the half-built clinic empty. Which is exactly the fear reformers have about the Dec. 17 parliamentary election: With Russia's democracy half-built, will anyone show up at the polls?Nearly four years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia is facing the likelihood that communists are going to stage a comeback in the parliamentary elections because they are angry, motivated and well-organized.

MOSCOW -- Russia's parliament, angry and frustrated at how easily Chechen guerrillas captured nearly 2,000 hostages and then drove home to freedom, launched its own political war on the government yesterday.Officially, the State Duma attacked Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin and his Cabinet by approving a motion of no confidence in the government, 241-70. But the vote was intended as a strong rebuke to President Boris N. Yeltsin."The latest tragedy in Budyonnovsk is a typical example of vTC incompetence and irresponsibility of our authorities," said Sergei Glazyev, referring to the five-day crisis in the southern Russia town.

MOSCOW -- The government says Sergei Mavrodi stole the investments of millions of Russians. But nobody wants to believe it, and just to show how much they like the guy the citizens of a Moscow suburb have elected him to parliament.Three months ago Mr. Mavrodi was riding high as head of the MMM investment company, which promised a 3,000 percent annual return and whose stock was doubling in price seemingly every week although no one ever found out what it was investing in.Then the share price came tumbling down to less than 1 percent of its former value, and soon Mr. Mavrodi was in jail on tax evasion charges.

MOSCOW -- In a direct confrontation with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Boris N. Yeltsin and the leadership of the Russian Federation officially warned the Soviet parliament yesterday not to grant the emergency powers requested by Mr. Gorbachev.In an emotional speech Friday, Mr. Gorbachev asked for the power to override existing law in connection with the planned transition to a market economy.But Russian Federation officials, citing Mr. Gorbachev's statement that he might have to dissolve some elected bodies, expressed fear that he could use special powers to dissolve the Russian parliament and impose direct presidential rule in the largest of the 15 Soviet republics.

WASHINGTON -- Russians emerged from their August revolution with a renewed commitment to the idea of a central union authority -- despite their claim of independence.Moreover, a large majority believes that nuclear weapons (63 percent) as well as the army (57 percent) should be controlled by the central authority rather than by Russia or the other republics.In a post-coup telephone survey of 1,035 residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg on Sept. 1-3, 62 percent of the respondents confirmed support found in a poll of European Russia in May (61 percent)

Former Russian Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar makes no apologies for the radical economic reforms he enacted in 1992 and 1993, even though the backlash against them forced him out of Russian President Boris Yeltsin's cabinet in January, and he says his country needs more of the same."

MOSCOW -- A foreign-backed program to provide funds for civilian projects for Russian nuclear-weapons scientists finally started up this week, but Russian officials insisted there be no fanfare for fear it might provoke an outcry from ultranationalists in the Federal Assembly, or parliament.The program calls for the United States, Japan and the European Union to give $12 million to 600 of these scientists in the coming months and $57 million to more than 3,000 over the next few years.The program is driven by the fear that as Russia's military budget declines, its suddenly impoverished nuclear scientists might feel tempted to accept lucrative offers from Iraq, Libya or some other country to help build a nuclear weapon.